



PS 3521 
.N25 U6 
I 1904 
Copy 1 




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AUTHOR'S AUTOGRAPH EDITION 
OF UPLAND PASTURES 

THE EDITION LIMITED TO 
TWELVE HUNDRED COPIES, 
OF WHICH ELEVEN HUNDRED 
ARE FOR SALE. PRINTED 
ON RUISDAEL HANDMADE 
PAPER, FROM TYPE 
AFTERWARDS DISTRIBUTED. 



THIS COPY IS No./././ *Z<^ 

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UPLAND PASTURES 




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Copyright, 1904, by 
PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 
Publishers, San Francisco, Cal. 



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to my friend 
mary curtis richardson 
this; small volume is 
affectionately inscribed 



CONTENTS 

The Beginnings of Things ------ 3 

Springtime Showers 13 

Where the Bee Sucks 33 

Floral Socialists 33 

Scouring-Weed 45 

Wings of the Morning 55 

An Idyl of the Hills 63 

At the Smithy Door ----- 71 



— V 



«« I 



Can any man charge God that 
He hath not given him enough to 
make his life happy? No, doubt- 
less; for Nature is content with a 
little. * * * What would a blind 
man give to see the pleasant riv- 
ers, and meadows, and flowers, and 
fountains, that we have met with? 
* * * And for most of them, be- 
cause they be so common, most 
men forget to pay their praises; 
but let us not, because it is a sac- 
rifice so pleasing to Him that made 
the sun, and us, and still protects 
us, and gives us flowers, and show- 
ers, and stomachs, and meat, and 
content, and leisure to go a-fishing." 

The Compleat Angler. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS 



HEN the warm rains succeed 
"winter's driving dow^npours, 
and the young grass begins to 
mantle the meadows with ten- 
der green, is the time, of all 
the year, to be out of doors. All 
the woodsy places are cool and 
dripping and dim and delicious. A month 
later they will be not less beautiful, perhaps, 
but less approachable. The things of Nature 
grow sophisticated as the season advances. 
In the early springtime they are frank and 
confiding, and willingly tell the secrets of 
their growth to him who asks. They have 
time, in these first beginnings of things, for 
friendly sociability: to show their tiny roots 
and bulbs, and to let us study the delicate, 
gracious unfoldings of leaf and bud and blos- 
som. In a few w^eeks they will all be too 
busy keeping up with the season's swift 
march, to stop and visit with the even lov- 
ingest of human friends. 

Do w^e forget, from springtime to spring- 
time, how lovely will be the year's awaken- 
ing ? Each winter of our discontent I think 
that I remember, as my longing imagination 
looks forward, the tender charm of the spring- 
time wonder, yet with each recurring year 




it comes to me as a ne'w and unkno'svn joy. 
The whole world seems to welcome the new 
year-child. Even before the first growths ap- 
pear there is a hushed awareness throughout 
Nature that moves the heart to thankfulness 
and remembered expectation. The hope of 
springtime comes without stint, and without 
fail, bringing to each one of us the message 
his heart is prepared to receive, and quicken- 
ing our purest, least sordid impulses. The 
best that is in us seems possible, in the spring- 
time. Who of us does not then dream that this 
best will yet gain strength to withstand the 
heat and drouth of summer's fierce searching? 

We turn to Mother Nature like children 
who long to be good. The worshiping instinct 
which lies deep within each soul goes out to 
her, vesting her with that personality which 
we have long since pronounced unthinkable 
when applied to God. There is a suggestion 
in the situation which is not without a certain 
saving humor to relieve it from grotesqueness. 
We are not far from a personal god when we 
send our souls out in loving contemplation of 
personified Nature, yet we still go on asking 
if God is, and if He is Truth. 

Whom do we ask, and why does the ques- 
tion rise? If God is Truth, He must be uni- 




versa! ; and to be perceived by each soul for 
himself. If, then, I perceive him not, either He 
is not the truth, or else I am not simple and 
sincere in desiring the truth. If He is not the 
truth, do I then desire human persuasion that 
He is ? Or, if I am not simple and sincere, who 
can make me so? 

Nature will help us if we turn to her. We 
have filled our lives so full of complexities and 
problems that it is well for us to have her 
annual reminder that, even without our taking 
thought about it, the real world, that will be 
here when we, with all our busyness, shall 
have passed from sight, has renewed itself, 
and stands bidding us come and find peace. 

For Nature keeps open house for us, and 
even w^hen we visit her and leave a trail of 
dust and desolation behind us, like the stupid, 
imtidy children we are, she only sets herself, 
with the silent, persistent patience of her age- 
wise motherhood, to cover and remove it 
Down in the canyon, this morning, among the 
trillium, and loosestrife, and wild potato, I foimd 
the inevitable tin can, left by some picnicker 
to mar and desecrate the landscape, but now 
completely filled with soft brown mold, and 
growing in it a mass of happy green wood- 
sorreL This is better than going at things 



w^ith a broom, gathering them up and remov- 
ing them from one place to another, which is 
about as far as ^^re humans have progressed 
in our science of cleaning up. 

I was glad to welcome the trillium. How 
one loves its quaint old name of Wake-robin, 
fitting title for this first harbinger of spring, 
that comes to us even before the robin's note 
is heard! Many of our common w^ild flowers 
have several names, but there is none with 
such invariably pretty ones as all ages have 
united in bestowing upon Wake-robin. Birth- 
root, our forefathers called it, seeing the birth 
of the new year in its early blossoming, and 
how many generations have known it as the 
Trinity-flower! But 'tis best known, I think, 
as Wake-robin, and the very breath of spring 
is in the name. 

A member of the great lily family is Wake- 
robin. It loves damp, shady places, and moist, 
rich valleys. On the Pacific Coast we do not 
find the typical Eastern variety, but w^e have 
a variety of our own, still unmistakably 
Wake-robin. Its color varies from rich mad- 
der red to pale pink, sometimes showing al- 
most w^hite. It grow^s from a thick, tuber-like 
root, and the calyx has, surrotmding its three 
red petals and three green sepals, three broad, 



mottled green leaves which, for some imao 
coimtable reason, our florists remove when 
they offer the flower for sale. A strange 
whimsy, this. The poor blossoms, thus de- 
nuded, have a bewildered, self-conscious air, 
such as may have been worn by the little 
egg-selling woman of old, who awoke from 
her nap by the king's highway to find her 
petticoats shorn. Well may Wake-robin thus 
question its own identity. It is no longer the 
trillium of the forest: it is only the trillium 
of conmaerce, a sad, unlovely object 

A bank where Wake-robin lifts its bonny 
head is always fair to see. The plant has 
certain boon companions always sure to be 
close at hand. The Solomon's seal is one of 
these, its roots bearing to this day the round 
marks imagined by the early foresters to be 
none other than the seal of Sulyman, the son 
of Daoud, whose seal was the stamp of wis- 
dom. There is no more exquisite green than 
the beautiful, shining leaves of this plant, with 
its tiny white bells of flowers. It has a near 
relative almost sdways growing near it, that, 
with singular paucity of imagination, our bot- 
anists have called "False Solomon's Seal." 

How we reveal our mental habits through 
this trick we have of falsifying the plants. 



We say "false" asphodel, "false" rice, "false" 
hellebore, "false" spikenard and miterwort, 
but the falsity is in our own vain imaginings. 
The plants are as true as the earth that bears 
them, or the rain and the stmshine that bring 
them to perfection. The Solomon's seal is one 
lily, the "false" Solomon's seal another. Man 
may be false; "perilous Godheads of choos- 
ing" are his, but the wild things of the woods 
are true, each in the order of its nature. 

There are no complexities or subtiUties 
about Wake-robin, here by the streamside. 
You may see it at a glance, for its principles 
are brief and fundamental, as wise old Marcus 
Avu-elius bids us let our own be, and yet the 
plant has had its vicissitudes; has met and 
solved its problems. Reasoning from analo- 
gies, time must have been when, like others 
of its great family, it grew in the water, float- 
ing out its broad leaves, lolling at ease on the 
surfaces of swampy, watery places and still 
ponds. Times changed. Lands rose and wa- 
ters subsided, and Wake-robin foimd itself in 
the midst of new conditions. The problem of 
self-support confronted it, and the plant solved 
it by diverting from its broad, sustaining sep- 
als nutriment to enable the long, swaying 
stem to meet the new demands upon it. It 

8 



still loves water and seeks cool, damp woods 
and deep canyons, growing beside little streams 
"Where it lifts its face to greet the springtime. 
It is probably not so big as when it rested 
luxuriously upon the water, but it is Wake- 
robin, still, and it does more than summon the 
birds: it calls each of us back to Nature, bid- 
ding us keep otu* hearts and souls alive to 
see, with each renewing of springtime, and to 
love afresh, the miracles of Nature's redemp- 
tive force. 



SPRINGTIME SHOWERS 



SPRINGTIME SHOWERS 



HE beauty of springtime, like 
the beauty of childhood, is al- 
ways new. All about me the 
things of Natiu-e are still in the 
mystical, subtile tenderness of 
their young, green growth. The 
golden days of autumn are full 
of their own beauty. The gray days of win- 
ter's mist and fog have theirs, but there is 
something in the tender blue days of the rainy 
springtime which sets the heart apraise, and 
brings out as nothing else can the meanings 
of leaf and bud, of flower and tree. 

It is raining now. Up above me, on the 
road, several picnickers who have been caught 
in this April shower are hurrying to shelter. 
They look down curiously at me, here under 
the willow, and I have some misgiving as to 
whether they are not setting an example 
that I should follow. But I am sure that it is 
a great mistake always to know enough to 
go in when it rains. One may keep snug and 
dry by such knowledge, but one misses a 
world of loveliness. There is, after all, a cer- 
tain selective wisdom in recognizing how de- 
sirable it is to take the showers as they come. 
There is something peculiarly tender and 
loving about an April shower. One is so 

13 



fully conscious, even "while the drops are fall- 
ing, that the sun is shining behind the light 
clouds. And the drops themselves come down 
so gently, tentatively offering themselves, as 
it were, to the welcoming earth — pattering 
lightly on the leaves, and softly rippling the 
surface of the little pool under the willows. 
That is a wonderful sort of comparison the 
Hebrew poet gives us when he likens the 
teaching of truth to the small rain upon the 
tender herb: the showers upon the green 
grass. 

The young colt in the stall yonder thrusts 
an eager head over the half-door, and with 
soft black muzzle in the air stands, open 
mouthed, to catch the delicious trickle. The 
cattle on the hills seem glad of the wetting; 
even the birds have not sought shelter, and 
why should I? 

I love to watch the leaves of the trees and 
plants, in the rain. They tell us so many se- 
crets about the life of which they are a part. 
Why, for instance, does this pond-lily spread 
out its broad, pleasant leaves upon the wa- 
ter's surface, while its cousin, the wild onion, 
has long, narrow grasslike leaves ? Why do 
the leaves of the pungent wormwood, here, 
stand rigidly pointing upwards, while those 

14 



of yonder big oak are spread out before the 
descending rain? 

Watch the wormwood. See how the rain- 
drops quiver for an instant on the tips of 
the pinnate leaves, then follow one another 
in a mad chase down the groove that trav- 
erses the center of each leaf. Notice that 
the leaf itself rises from three ridges on the 
stem of the plant, and that between these 
ridges lie shallow channels down which the 
raindrops run to the plant's root. Now, we 
can tell from these signs what sort of a root 
the wormwood has. I never pulled one of 
the plants, but I am sure that if we were to 
pluck one up we should find it to have a 
main tap-root, with no branches. All such 
plants have leaves pointing upwards, and 
grooved stems, admirably adapted to bring 
water to the thirsty roots. The beets and the 
radishes afford us capital examples of this 
provision. 

This alfileria has another arrangement of 
leaf, for this same purpose. It is a widely 
spreading forage-plant, with an absurdly small 
root It needs a great deal of moisture, and 
so its stems are thickly set with soft, fuzzy 
hairs, which catch the water and convey it to 
the root 

15 



Growing all along the bank is the little 
chickweed, with its tiny white star of a blos- 
som. If it were not so common we should 
wax enthusiastic over its beauty, and seek it 
for our garden borders. This has a running, 
threadlike root, which receives the raindrops 
caught by the stem in a single row of tiny 
hairs along its lower side, and sprinkles them 
gently down. 

When a plant has a spreading root such 
as the willow yonder sends down, the leaves 
spread outward and downward, from base to 
tip, letting their gathered moisture down upon 
it. When the plant grows under water its 
leaves are long and threadlike; for the supply 
of carbon is limited ; and they divide minutely, 
that the greatest possible surface may be ex- 
posed to absorb it. If the stem grows imtil 
the leaves reach the surface of the water, 
they broaden and spread out; for here they 
get an abundant food supply which they may 
freely appropriate, as none of it need be di- 
verted to build up a supporting stem. The 
water affords the leaves ample support. 

The grasses grow in blades for the same 
reason that the plants growing under water 
put out slender, threadlike leaves. The air 
supply would seem abundant, but the grass- 

i6 



leaves are many and low-growing plants are 
numerous. So they divide and subdivide, that 
greater surface may be presented to the sim- 
light and the air. In this form the blades are 
fittest to obtain their necessary food supply and 
thus to survive. We see this same tendency 
in the leaves of the eschscholtzia, of the but- 
tercup and of all the great crowfoot family. 

Across the road stretches a line of locusts, 
just now in dainty, snowy, fragrant blossom. 
The individuality of a tree is a constant and 
delightful fact in Nature. The locust is as 
unlike the oak or the willow as can well 
be imagined, yet like them in taking on an 
added and characteristic loveliness in the rain. 
How delicately the branches pencil themselves 
against the blue and silver of the cloudy sky 
and the dark green of the orchard beyond 
them! The leaves have such a ptirely inci- 
dental air. The lines of the tree were, them- 
selves, lovely enough in their green and mossy 
wetness to delight the eye. To deck them so 
laceywise in an openw^ork of leaf and blossom 
w^as beneficent gratuity on the part of Mother 
Nature, for the pleasing of her children. 

Down below, where the creek widens, the 
sycamores have grown to great size. How 
they help the heart, these gnarly giants, with 

17 



the "white patches against the grays and 
blacks of their rough trunks! How they 
spread their branches against the sky and 
beckon and point the beholder upwards! 
These sylvan prophets bear a promise of 
good, and demand of every passer-by the 
query of the wise old stoic: "Who is he that 
shall hinder thee from being good and 
simple?" 

Over the rounded hill, stealing softly, in 
Indian file, through the mist, a row of euca- 
lyptus trees climb, fringing up the slopes. 
These ladies of the hilltop have a fashion of 
growing thus, and in no other position is 
their delicate, suggestive beauty more appar- 
ent. The eucalyptus is an original genius 
among trees, never repeating itself. It stands 
for endless variety, for strong good cheer, 
for faith that seeks and reaches and goes on, 
never wavering. It blesses as w^ell as de- 
lights its friends. I love its w^onderful, ever- 
varying leaves, its upreaching, outstretching 
branches, and the annual surprise of its mys- 
tic blossoming. Each tree is distinct and 
individual in its growth, yet every one is 
typical of the genus. 

It is a tree of the wind and the storm. See 
how those in yonder group sway and cour- 

l8 



tesy, bow and beckon, advance and retreat 
in the light breeze! And the rain does such 
marvels to them in the way of color, tinting 
the leaves into wondrous things of glistening 
black and silver, and bringing out exquisite, 
evasive greens and browns, reds and rose 
colors, tender blues and grays, from the trunks 
and branches. All the things of Nature are 
for man's use and joy, but perhaps they serve 
their very highest use when we return God 
thanks for their beauty. 

Yes, I am sure that there is a wisdom 
wiser than the prudence w^hich sends us in 
out of the rain. The flow^ers and the grasses 
teach us more than has ever been put be- 
tween the covers of books. The trees bring 
us the real news of the real world long before 
they are crushed into pulp and made into the 
paper on which is printed our morning ser- 
vice from the scandal-monger and the stock- 
broker. It w^as heralded as a marvelous tri- 
umph of modem ingenuity w^hen, the other 
day, a forest tree was cut down and made 
into paper on w^hich the news of the w^orld 
was printed and hawked along the streets 
within four and one-half hours from the mo- 
ment when the axe was laid at the root of 
the tree. Marvelously clever, that, but shall we 

19 



ever be wise enough to bring the trees them- 
selves to the city, instead? If we were but 
able to read the message they bear, the news- 
paper might go away into outer darkness, 
whence it sprang. 

There is a fearful moment of reckoning be- 
fore us should it ever chance that when all our 
trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar 
of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper 
supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find 
ourselves some fine morning, minus our daily 
tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left 
to the companionship of our own thoughts. 
Dante never imagined a terror like this. 

But the sun has come out again. The rain 
is over and gone. Only the last treasured 
drops chase one another along the leaves and 
down the stems of the plants. Our picnickers 
are venturing forth. The wet blades of grass 
sparkle m the sunlight. Over on the bank 
a ruby-throated hummer is flying back and 
forth across a tiny stream which patters and 
splashes against a rock. These morsels of 
birds love a shower-bath, and this fellow now 
has one exactly to his mind. The clouds have 
drifted down the sky and everything seems 
glad and grateful for "the usefiil trouble of 
the rain." 

20 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 



NCE upon a time man conceived 
the belief that this universe, 
with its many w^orlds swing- 
ing through space, was created 
for him. He fancied that the 
sun shone by day to warm and 
vivify him; that the stars of 
night were none other than lamps to his 
feet; that the other animals existed to afford 
him food and clothing — and sport; that the 
very flowers of the field blossomed and 
fruited and w^ere beautiful for his gratifica- 
tion. In fact, man conceived the belief that 
instead of being the w^ise brother and helper 
of this creation amidst which he moves, he 
was the great central pivot upon which all 
revolves. 

A sorry lesson, surely, for man to read into 
the broad, open page of Nature's great book. 
Small w^onder that to him in his meanness 
its message came as "the painfiil riddle of the 
earth." But it was the best he could do: it 
is the best any of us can do until we have 
learned the great lesson which the ancient 
Wise One has written out for us — w^hich she 
wll teach us, in time, through death, if we 
will not let her teach it through life: the 
lesson that use is not appropriation; that ap- 

23 



propriation sets use to groan and sweat under 
fardels of evil. 

We are learning this lesson, with a bad 
grace, like blundering school boys, fumbling 
at our hornbook, stuttering and stammering 
over the alphabet of life, the while our minds 
wander stupidly off to the playthings of our 
unholy civilization. Perhaps some day we 
shall spell out a meaning to this riddle which 
we have made so painful, and with the mean- 
ing get somewhat of the humility which comes 
with knowing. But now man does not read 
the book of Nature to much better purpose 
than he reads those other volumes, written 
by himself, and bought by himself, in bulk, to 
adorn his libraries: portly tomes to which he 
may point with pride as evidence that at 
least his shelves hold wisdom, tho' his head 
may never. 

I use no figure of speech when I say that 
we may now buy our books in bulk. I saw, 
only this morning, the advertisement of a 
large dry goods "emporium" (*tis laces and 
literature now) wherein is announced for sale 
the bound volumes of a popular magazine. 
"Over eight pounds of the choicest reading, 
boimd in the usual style — olive green!" 

Nature has olive greens, too, in styles usual 

24 



and unusual, and she has marvelous messages 
for her lovers, but she cannot be bought in 
bulk, nor put upon shelves, nor even carried 
in the head until she first be received into 
the heart. A little flaxen-haired girl brought 
me, this morning, a ptu-e white buttercup on 
the stem with three yellow ones. 

"See," she said, "here is one buttercup they 
forgot to paint!" 

I took the flower from her hand. I could 
not tell her just how it happened that this 
one perianth was white, but I explained to 
her something of how the others came to be 
yellow. What we call a flower is not, usually, 
the flower at all, but merely its petals. The 
real flower is the cluster, in the center of the 
calyx, of pistils and their surrounding pollen- 
bearing stamens. Away back in the ages 
when man had not yet developed his aesthetic 
sense, perhaps even before he had learned to 
make fire, the primitive flower bore only these 
pistils and stamens, with a little outer pro- 
tective whorl of green petals. It was fertilized 
by the pollen falling upon the pistils. 

But this was not good for the plant Those 
flowers which in some way became fertilized 
by pollen from other plants of the same vari- 
ety, by cross-fertilization, in fact, were healthier 

as 




and stronger than those fertilized by their 
own pollen. In such plants as wind-blown 
pollen reached, this cross-fertilization was an 
easy matter, but the buttercup is not one of 
these. It is forced to rely upon insects for 
fertilization. So the plant began to secrete a 
sweet drop at the base of each green petal. 
Such insects as discovered this nectar and 
stopped to sip were dusted with the pollen 
of the plant and carried it to other flowers, 
where it fertilized the pistils, the insect gath- 
ering from every blossom a fresh burden of 
pollen to be carried along on his nectar-seek- 
ing round. 

This was very good, so far as it went, but 
the flowers were pale and inconspicuous, and 
many of them, overlooked by the insects, were 
never visited. Certain ones, however, owing 
to accidents or conditions of soil and mois- 
ture, had the calyx a little larger, or brighter 
colored than their fellows, and these the 
insects found. It happened, therefore, if any- 
thing ever does merely happen, that the flow- 
ers with bright petals were fertilized, and 
their descendants were even brighter colored. 
Thus, in time, the buttercup, by the process 
which, for lack of a better name, we call nat- 
ural selection, came to have bright yellow 

26 




petals, because these attract the insect best 
adapted to fertilize it. If man's aesthetic sense 
is gratified by the flower's beauty, why man 
is by so much the better off, but that man 
is pleased by the bright color is not half so 
important to the buttercup as is the pleasure 
of a certain little winged beetle which sees the 
shining golden cup and knows that it means 
honey. 

In the same way the lupin, yonder, with its 
pretty blue and white blossoms, has devel- 
oped its blue petals because it is fertilized by 
the bees. They seek it as they do other 
blossoms, not only for honey, but for the pol- 
len itself, which stands them in place of bread. 
The very shape of the flower is due to the 
visits of countless generations of this insect. 
The bee is the insect best adapted to fertilize 
the lupin, and when he alights upon the 
threshold of a blossom his weight draws the 
low^er petal down, and entering to suck the 
sweets he gets his head dusted with pollen. 
If a fly were to gain entrance to the flower, 
he would carry away no pollen. He is smaller 
than the bee, and his head could not reach it. 
So honey-seeking flies alight in vain; their 
w^eight is not enough to press the calyx open, 
so they may not enter and drink of its sweets. 

27 



Yonder on a blossom of the mimulus, the 
odd-looking monkey-plant, a honeybee just 
had this same experience. The bumblebee is 
the only insect large enough to reach the 
pollen in this blossom, and so its doors will 
open only to him. Botanists tell us that all 
this great family, to which belong the various 
peas blossoms and their cousins, were once 
five-petaled plants, but natural selection has 
brought about their present shape, which is 
an admirable protection against the depreda- 
tions of small insects who might pillage, but 
could not fertilize the flowers. Blue is the 
favorite color of the honeybee, and next to 
blue he prefers red. So bee blossoms are 
blue or red. 

Most of our small white flowers are fertil- 
ized by insects which fly at night. This is the 
reason why white blossoms are more fragrant 
than their bright-hued sisters. Bright colors 
could not be seen at night, but the fragrance 
of the white flowers, always more noticeable 
by night than by day, serves the same end — 
to attract the useful insects. This is an es- 
sential part of Nature's wonderful plan. The 
flower lives by giving. 

There is an endless fascination in this 
page which Nature opens out before us, in 

28 



her upland pastures. A wise teacher once 
told me his experience with a restless, un- 
manageable boy. "I could do nothing with 
him," the teacher said, " until I got him inter- 
ested in field life." One day this boy went 
off on a holiday tramp, returning the day fol- 
lowing. His teacher asked him what he had 
seen, and this is what he remembered of his 
outing: "I camped in a field for the night," 
said he, "and I saw a bee light on a poppy 
and crawl in. The poppy shut up and caught 
him. Next morning I woke up early and 
watched, and by and by the poppy opened 
and the bee came out." 

There are those who might have missed 
the sacred significance of such a narrative, 
but that teacher was a very wise man and 
he knew that the reading lesson given him 
then was a page from his rough boy*s soul- 
life, and he conned it with reverent delight. 
Life together was more real for them both 
after that day. 

The keener our realization of the human 
love that is in the flowers, in the trees, in all 
the w^ild life about us, the richer is our hu- 
manity, the fuller our reception of life and 
love, the more thoughtful our use of all the 
things of Nature becomes. Once I saw an 

29 



FLORAL SOCIALISTS 



WAS sitting here beside the 
stream, watching the bees 
swarm in and out at the en- 
trance to their hive, when Her- 
cules passed by. "Come and 
watch the bees," I called as he 
passed. " They are interesting." 
He stood and studied the busy workers, intent 
upon the business of their miniature society. 
" I wonder," he said at last, " if otu* human rea- 
son shall ever evolve a system half so per- 
fect as the one that mere instinct has taught 
these feeble insects." 

As I w^as silent he continued: 
" Well, at all events, I can learn one lesson 
from the bees, and be off about my business. 
If society is ever to be freed from its burdens 
every soul must do its full duty. One life 
wasted means a whole world hindered just 
that much." And Hercules was gone to his 
labors. How fearful we all are of wasting our 
lives, yet so rarely fearful for the results of 
the ceaseless activity with which we crowd 
them I 

But Hercules' words are full of suggestive- 
ness. Is our boasted human reason really less 
adequate to the needs of our life than is what 
we call instinct, this thing that looks so much 

33 



more reasonable than our reason, of the lower 
orders ? What if, after all, we are making a 
desperate mistake in supposing that it is this 
faculty which we call reason which distin- 
guishes us from the brute creation! 

It is because the bees and the other dumb 
creatures have nothing more than this meas- 
ure of reason which we call instinct, that it 
serves them perfectly. Man has something 
else, which draws him higher ; which prompts 
him further. But alas for us! With the des- 
tiny to live perfectly as human beings, we yet 
long for the restrictions through which we 
may live perfectly as the beasts! We seek 
our lessons from the brutes while the Eternal 
waits to teach us. We cannot live like the 
beasts. The divine human spark within us 
will not let us. We must live higher than 
they or we shall live lower, for our perfection 
of order is infinitely higher than theirs, and 
our failure immeasurably lower than they 
can sink. 

But we go on, we modern Athenians, seek- 
ing to ameliorate the conditions we have 
brought upon society by our own stupid dis- 
obedience and inhumanity, and only now and 
then do we have a faint suspicion that our 
newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of 

34 



ideas old as thought itself. Men get new sets 
of phrases and dress therein the ideas that 
underlie the universe. We apply the terms of 
science to the old faiths and think that we 
have invented a new religion. We find new 
names for God Himself, and believe ourselves 
to have discovered a new life-principle. Lov- 
ing the neighbor becomes enlightened altruism, 
and lo, faith is bom anew, with a subtiler 
power to redeem the world. 

Hercules is a Socialist. He always spells 
society with a great S, and he declares that 
in the present state of Society we can take 
no thought for individuals. "The individual 
may perish," he says, in moments of elo- 
quence, "but the integrity of Society must be 
jealously maintained." 

I wonder, as I sit here watching the bees, 
whether Society might not, after all, find 
easement from its ails if each individual of 
us, myself and Hercules included, should pay 
strict attention to our individual business of 
growing; of becoming humanized. Just here 
at my hand a bee has alighted and is bury- 
ing its nose in a clover blossom. Here is an 
example of a life lived only for Society, yet 
so important is the individual to this highly 
perfected body social, that I have seen half a 

35 



dozen bees, when a laden worker has arrived 
at the hive openings weighted down, too 
exhausted to do other than drop, helpless, 
upon the threshold, rush to its assistance, 
relieve it of its heavy load and help it to 
pass within to gather strength for further 
effort. The strict individualist complains, in 
turn, of the bees, because they have no indi- 
vidual life; no existence separate from the 
hive. But what higher individuality can any 
creature desire than is comprised and summed 
up in the divine opportimity to bring his indi- 
vidual gift to the common store? 

I have picked the clover blossom which 
the bee just left. Beside it are growing other 
blossoms, and I gather a couple. They are 
the veriest wayside weeds — dandelion and 
dog-fennel — but they are important because 
they are typical representatives of the largest 
order in the floral kingdom; an order which, 
although it was the last to appear in the 
vegetable world, has outstripped every other 
and leads them all today. Botanists call it 
the Composite Order. Its members are really 
floral socialists, just as Hercules and the rest 
of us who believe that government is an 
order of nature, and good for the race, are 
human socialists, whether we know it or not 

36 



But most of us hold a mistaken idea about 
the relation of the individual to the whole. 
We are apt to theorize that it is the duty of 
the individual to keep the whole in order, 
and a good many of us are fully convinced 
that the world owes us a living. So it does, 
and it behooves each one of us to be faithful 
in discharging his individual share of the 
aggregate debt. Nature has a whole page 
about this, in her wonderful volume. 

Take, for instance, this clover. What we 
call the blossom is, in reality, many blos- 
soms. Look at the mass under a glass. You 
will see that the clover head is made up of 
numerous minute cups in a compact cluster. 
Each cup is a perfect blossom. As we now 
see it in the clover it is a tiny tube, but it 
once possessed five slender petals which are 
now united. The little pointed scallops rim- 
ming the cup suggest these petals. Now, the 
tiny cup is descended from a five-petaled 
ancestor, growing upon its individual stem 
and depending upon insects for its fertiliza- 
tion. The flower was small, however, and 
many of them must have been overlooked 
by the insects. But those blossoms which, 
growing very close together, formed little clus- 
ters, were more conspicuous than the soli- 

37 



tary ones, and were discovered, visited for 
their honey and incidentally fertilized by 
the winged freebooters. They bore fruit, and 
their descendants inherited the social instinct 
prompting them to draw together that each 
might give the other its help and coopera- 
tion in attracting the insects. So, by degrees, 
the cooperative habit became fixed in the 
clover, and in many other plants, until the 
compositse became a botanical fact. 

In other words, the individuals formed a 
body social of their own, growing from a 
compact cluster from a common stem, each 
giving and receiving, constantly, its use and 
share in the common life. The many-petaled 
flowers found it inconvenient to arrange them- 
selves in the composite order, and so, as we 
see in the clover, the petals have pressed 
closely together and united to form a tube- 
shaped flower, and as the tubular form is 
best adapted to receive fertilization by the 
bee, which insect is the most useful to the 
clover blossom, that form has been perpetu- 
ated in this plant. 

Thus by the simple process of each indi- 
vidual giving itself to the common life, the 
mutual protection and development of the 
whole, this order of plants has become the 

38 



largest in the floral kingdom. The compos- 
itae have circled the globe. They fill our hot- 
houses and flourish in our gardens; they 
greet us by the dusty road, and in the sum- 
mer woods. The lovely golden-rods, the sturdy 
asters, the aristocratic chrysanthemums, the 
dainty daisies all belong to this great order. 
So does helianthus, the big, beaming sun- 
flower. 

It is quite true that each blossom of the 
compositae has given its life to the race. But 
what if, after all, life with our fellows is a 
giving instead of the receiving we are wont 
to think it? What if, after all, the true out- 
look upon Society will one day show us that 
our neighbor is put here that we may have the 
great, the inestimable joy of living for him? 

All matter is made up of molecules. Sci- 
ence tells us, and there is another Voice as 
of One having Authority, which tells us that 
God hath made of one blood all nations of 
men for to dwell upon the face of the earth. 
We humans are but larger molecules in the 
body social. We live only in so far as the 
common life flows through us. We move 
freely, in our places, and by a wonderful pro- 
vision of Divine Wisdom we cannot give one 
another that which is really and unmistak- 

39 



ably our own. No human thought, even, ever 
traveled a straight course from one human 
soul to another and was received exactly as 
it was sent. We live our lives each within 
the molecular envelope of his individual body, 
and we can no more mix, in reality, than the 
molecules mix. We live only in the flux and 
reflux ot the Life of all, and only as we pass 
this on have power to receive. 

It is when life is fullest that we turn to 
our fellows. Those of us who are true know 
that then we need them most, and so our 
real drawings together are in order that we 
may give. We know this, in that secret part 
of us where lies what most of us call our 
human weakness, but we are faithless to the 
knowledge, and choose to live on a lower 
plane, within that outer circle which we call 
knowing. We profess that we come together 
to receive, but who of us does not know the 
emptiness of death which lies in such com- 
ing? We are all a little better than this. In 
secret we know that it is more blessed to 
give than to receive, but we are ashamed of 
our knowledge. 

We are less simple and true than the dan- 
delion, the dog-fennel and the sweet-clover 
here in the grass. The small, common blos- 

40 



soms grow so cheerily one is glad to come 
back to them. It is true that not one wee 
tube or strap or head in any cluster could 
have much life outside the aggregate blos- 
som, but the integrity and perfection of each 
is an essential factor in the integrity and 
perfection of the whole. The tiny single 
flower that I can pull from this dandelion 
seems but an insignificant speck, but, by and 
by, could it have been let alone, it would, its 
ripeness and perfection attained, have taken 
to itself wings and sailed fluffily off upon the 
breeze to renew its life, perhaps a thousand 
miles from here. Seeing it float through the 
air, a poet might have found it a theme for a 
sonnet ; a scientist might have seen universal 
law embodied in its structure, or a seer have 
reasoned from it to Life Eternal. 

Yet, but for the cooperation of its fellows 
in the body floral, it could not have lived 
any more than, save for its fellows, what we 
know as the dandelion could have lived. 

The law of cooperation, like all of Nature's 
laws, makes for rightness and fitness all 
along the line. Nature teaches us, with ever- 
repeated emphasis, the lesson of interdepend- 
ence of kind. The isolated being is, every- 
where, the comparatively helpless being. The 

41 



tree growing by itself in the open field often 
attains to more symmetrical perfection and 
beauty than the tree in the crowded forest, 
but woodsmen tell us that the forest tree 
makes the better timber. 

We must live with and for our fellows, 
but he does this best who, in the quiet order 
of the common life, opens widest his soul to 
the Source thereof, and growing to the full 
stature of a man helps on to perfection the 
composite flower of our human civilization. 



42 



SCOURING-WEED 



co-ji:*:o:tQO:mzm^Qr£m7mLOljm:-to 



SCOURING 



WEED 



*o. 






HE little spring here gushes 
up and sweeps away along 
a stony bed overgrown with 
brakes and tares. On its mar- 
gin, amid a tangle of wild 
blackberry, I have come upon 
a forest of scouring-rush. It is 
a quaint growth. I love to put my face close 
to the earth and, looking through the rushes' 
green stems, to fancy myself a wee brownie, 
wandering among a dense wilderness of pines. 
The development of the miniature trees is an 
interesting process. First the ground is cov- 
ered with slender brown fingers thrusting up 
through the soil. These grow rapidly, and in 
a few days spread out their brief, verticillate 
branches to the breeze, as proudly as any 
great tree might do. Here is a tiny finger 
just pointing upward; yonder towers the giant 
of the liliputian forest, fully half a foot high. 
" Scouring- weed," says the farmer, contempt- 
uously, "they ain't no good. Some call 'em 
horsetail." 

In fact the queer, witchy little things have 
a number of names: candle-rush, scouring- 
rush, horsetail, and their own proper appella- 
tion, equisitum. I have gathered a number 
of the little trees, and they lie side by side in 



45 



upheaval, some cataclysm of nature such as 
we find everywhere recorded in her rocky 
book. The land rose or sank, and the rocks 
and debris of the sea floor were thrown upon 
the decaying vegetation. It was pressed and 
compressed beneath this weight. The fronds 
of the huge ferns; the tall stems of the giant 
rushes; the monstrous club-mosses, massed 
together, and the primeval forest became a 
peat-bog. Still greater pressure — a longer 
lapse of aeons, and the peat became coal. 

We burn them now, in our grates, the 
progenitors of these feeble things lying here, 
limply, in my palm. Is it not a wonderful 
history the frail thing has? A degenerate 
stock, botanists call it. So are its cousins the 
ferns degenerate, with no botanical Nordau 
to sound warning against them. But degen- 
erates though they all are, they have still the 
spirit of the pioneer. They dwell in the out- 
posts of vegetable civilization. We do not 
find them flourishing where Nature is in her 
gentlest moods. Once, down in the crater of 
an active volcano, half a mile from any soil, 
growing from a sulphur-stained black-lava 
floor, I found a clump of waving green ferns, 
as high as my head, spreading out their 
broad fronds as though to cover and hide the 

48 




terrible nakedness of the unfinished earth. A 
thousand years from now a grain-field may 
spread where now those frail green plumes 
have just begun their gracious work. 

The clothing of the earth and the cleans- 
ing of the air were the tasks the giant rushes 
helped to perform for the young world. Dur- 
ing the process the rank gases of the atmos- 
phere were gradually stored up within their 
great stems. Liberated, now, in our grates 
and retorts they give us heat and light. The 
atmosphere become purer, the earth grown 
cool and life-sustaining, new growths ap- 
peared. All the conditions were improved, 
but the improvement meant death to the big 
rush. It was starving. 

It could not find food in the thin air. Its 
roots could not suck up enough moisture to 
sustain life^ It became smaller and smaller. 
Flowers and seeds it had never borne. It 
now gave up its leaves. Between every two 
whorls of branches on the scouring-rush we 
find a little brown, toothed sheath encircling 
the stem. In the days of the plant's pros- 
perity each of these teeth was a leaf, but now 
the rush can maintain no such extravagance 
as leaves, so there remain only these poor sur- 
vivals. The stem is hollow, and is divided, 

49 



between the whorls of branches, into closed 
sections, or joints. It has also an outer ring 
of hollow tubes, through which moisture is 
drawn up from the soil, to feed the branches. 
The rush is a little higher order of creation 
than the fern, but it is a cryptogram; that is 
a plant never bearing true seeds, but propa- 
gating by spores. 

And so, fallen upon hard lines, chilled, 
stunted by the cold, but having a brief span 
of life when the spring rains have made the 
earth wet and warm, and before the summer 
heat has come to wither it, we have our 
scouring-rush only a few inches high. And 
this branched stem which we see is not fer- 
tile. It is enough for it to support its wav- 
ing green feather. The fertile stems are not 
branched. They appear above the earth, pale 
and shrinking; put forth no branches, but live 
a brief season, develop their spores and dis- 
appear. 

The growth of the scouring-rush seems to 
me to show something beautiful, as well as 
interesting. There is a certain light-hearted 
gaiety in the waving, tree-like thing, which 
makes one forget that it is a degenerate stock, 
and doomed to destruction. Still a little work 
remains for it to do: still some waste places 

50 



and miasmatic bogs to be cleansed and puri- 
fied, and so the little rush grows on, the merest 
shadow of its once opulent self. I am sure 
that the last horsetail to be seen on earth 
will grow just as breezily, as greenly and as 
cheerily as any now waving in this make- 
believe enchsmted forest at my feet And who 
knows what may be the fate of that which 
was the real life of that ancient plant — the 
forces of light and heat set free in our furnaces 
and forges, to begin, again, their office of min- 
istering use ? 

Did the giant rush die? Does anything 
die? Ages have seen the rushes fall and pass 
from sight, to wake to glorious light in the 
leaping flames. We see, each year, leaves fall 
and turn to mold from which other life-forms 
spring. There will be other poppies, next 
year, where yonder orange-red blossoms nod 
in the breeze. The waving grain, already 
headed out and bowing under its burden of 
rain-drops, was but a few months since a mere 
handful of dry kernels. They were cast upon 
the ground, and they died, if that tossing sea of 
green is death. We see these things recurring 
upon every side of us, yet we still go up and 
down the earth demanding of prophet, priest 
and poet: "If a man die shall he live again?'* 

51 



A far cry from the little sprigs of scouring- 
rush in my hand ? But Life is a far cry, from 
Everlasting through Eternity, and who shall 
say, of the least of these, its manifestations, 
" It is no good ? " 



52 



WINGS OF THE MORNING 



WINGS OF THE MORNING 



OWN among the watercresses, 
an hour ago, stud5dng the move- 
ments of a mammoth slug, I 
was startled by a shadow fall- 
ing directly across my hands. 
At the same moment there was 
an excited fliury and scurrying 
to shelter, among a tuneful mob of song- 
sparrows who, all unmindful of my presence, 
were teetering close beside me upon the tall 
mustard stsdks which swayed beneath their 
weight. Looking upward I saw, between me 
and the sun, a pigeon-hawk soaring on motion- 
less wings in the freedom of the upper air. 
I watched him with a joy holding no drop 
of envy, as he circled widely against the 
sky, rising, falling, swerving, returning, with 
scarcely a dip of the strong, outstretched 
wings. High though he poised, my thought 
could reach him; strong though his flight, my 
fancy could follow and outstrip him. He, high 
above the mountain-tops, gazed downward to 
the earth. His thoughts, his desires were 
here. To materialize them he mounted the 
air. With my feet upon the earth, with no 
palpable pinions wherewith to climb the ether, 
yet had I moments of being, more truly than 
he, a creattu-e of the sky. 



55 



Something of this passed through my brain 
as I "watched the circling hawk. Once, with 
a flash of his strong wings, he made a down- 
ward turn and, swift and still, he dropped 
earthward. Then, as if frustrated in what- 
ever had been his design, he wheeled again 
and climbed as swiftly up the air. I like that 
phrase as describing the flight of a bird. It 
is so literally what the creature does. A bird 
is not superior to gravitation. But for that 
force he would be the helpless victim of every 
little breeze, like a balloon, which is unable 
to shape a course or to do anything but float 
helplessly before the wind. The balloon floats 
because it is lighter than the air, but the air 
which the bird displaces is lighter than he, 
and he only moves in it by virtue of his 
ability to extract from it, by the motion of his 
wings, sufficient recoil to propel himself for- 
ward. He rises, as do we humans, by means 
of that which resists him. I love to watch 
the sea-gulls. They fly so perfectly, and seem 
anxious to give us lessons in aerial naviga- 
tion as they dip and whirl and call about the 
steamers, on the bay. Their wings are so 
easy to study while in action. The first joint, 
to where the wing bends back and outward, 
is strong and compact, cup-shaped underneath. 

56 



The second joint tapers. The feathers are 
long and do not overlap so closely as do those 
of the first joint, and at the free ends they 
spread out and turn upwards. The upper 
surface of the wing is convex, the lower sur- 
face concave. In flying the wings are thrown 
forward and downward. Flying is not a flap- 
ping of the wings up and down, and if a bird 
w^ere to strike its wings backward and down- 
ward, as its manner of flight is so often pic- 
tured, it would turn a forward somersault in 
the air. 

Structurally the wing of a bird is a screw. 
It twists in opposite directions during the up 
and down strokes, and describes a figure of 8 
in the air. The bird throws its wings for- 
wards and downwards. The air is forced back 
and compressed in the cup-shaped hollows of 
the wings, and these latter, by the recoil thus 
obtained, drag the body forward. This resist- 
ance of the air is absolutely essential to flight. 
We who think that, but for the buffetings of 
hard fate, we, too, might soar high and fly free 
in the upper realm of endeavor, should watch 
the efforts of the birds in a calm. We shall 
scarcely see them flying. If impelled, by neces- 
sity, to flight, the process is a most laborious 
one. There being no resisting wind on which 

57 




to climb (birds always fly against the wind) 
the climber must, by the rapid action of his 
wings, establish a recoil which will send him 
along. Watch the little mud-hen, flying close 
to the surface of the water, ready to dive the 
instant its timidity takes fright. Its wings 
vibrate swiftly, unceasingly; for it rarely rises 
high enough above the water to have advan- 
tage of the air currents. For it there are no 
long, soaring sweeps through the air ; no free- 
dom from the labors of its cautious flight. It 
is a very spendthrift of effort because of the 
timidity which never lets it rise to the sustain- 
ing forces just above its head. To climb the 
sky is not for him who hugs cover. 

To fly! the very thought sets the nerves 
atingle. It is a joy to be afloat, "with a wet 
sheet and a flowing sea and a wind that fol- 
lows fast." It is a joy to be on the back of a 
swiftly running horse, with the wind rushing 
away from your face as you ride, bearing 
every care from your brain. But to traverse 
the air — to fly I This j oy we long for : we have 
an indisputable, an inalienable right to long 
for it. 

To what heights may we rise ? This, after 
all, is the question which concerns us. Sordid, 
creeping wights that we are, constantly refer- 

58 



ring our heavenward aspiration to the desire 
of the mortal, we still 

To man propose this test — 
Thy body, at its best, 
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way 7 

Our very protests, our kicking against the 
pricks which would incite us to higher effort, 
are but our blind fear, lest, after all, they 
should not mean flight. We are afraid of our 
moments of faith; ashamed of our aspiring 
impulses, the upward impulses which have 
throbbed through all life since the world was 
bom. We send forward our souls to see if 
haply they may find God, while we remain 
behind to weigh and test their evidence when 
they return to us— if they ever do return, 
hugging the surface the while, lest a sustain- 
ing breath of spiritual force lift us clean above 
the safe shelter into which we may dive alto- 
gether should our returning souls bring back 
news of the meanings of life, scaring us to 
cover, after all, by the thought that we, our- 
selves, are heaven and hell. 

Usually we are content to grovel. We trav- 
erse our little round and declare it to be 
destiny. We prate of the limitations of our 
htunanity, forgetful of that humanity's limit- 
less capacity to receive. With insincere self- 

59 



abasement we declare ourselves to be worms 
of the dust, and the spirits of light who look 
upon us may readily believe our assertions. 
But there are moments when the scales fall 
from our eyes. We get fleeting glimpses, then, 
of the meaning and the end of our human 
nature. We know that it is in the skies. We 
know that w^e have ourselves fashioned the 
chain that binds us to earth. We know that 
we were made for flight, and we know that we 
know all this ! 

Still afar in the sky the hawk soars, with 
downward gaze seeking his desire. Still, tho* 
my feet are upon the earth, my spirit fares 
upward in its flight toward its desire, above 
and beyond the strong-winged bird's farther- 
est flight ! 



60 



AN IDYL OF THE HILLS 



\ 



AN IDYL 



rs?: 



\£ 



OF THE HILLS 



WONDER whether the restless 
^ impulse which send city folk 
hillward in the springtime is 
not a part of the Divine Plan 
which would lead us aU to lift 
our eyes to the hills whence 
our help cometh. They flock 
up here, the city folk, during these first spring 
days, to eat their luncheons by the roadside 
and to fill their hands with the poppies and 
wild hyacinth, the blue-eyed grass and pim- 
pernel that everywhere dot the young mead- 
ows* glowing green. 

I hear, at nightfall, mothers' voices calling 
the little ones to prepare for home-going, and 
I love to see the contented parties go wander- 
ing down, the tiniest tired climber usually 
sound asleep in his father's arms, with the 
stm's last rays caressing the small face. It is 
good for them to be here. There is, in the 
dvunbest of us, a faint stirring of recognition 
that the hope and promise of life are in the 
young year. This love of the childhood of 
things is the best thing our human nature 
knows : the best because there is in it the least 
of self. It is a different thing from the love of 
new beginnings. It is not new beginnings, 
but first principles the soul seeks, now, and 

63 



so we climb the hills, as naturally as the 
daisies look upward, leaving behind us the 
pitiful aims that end in self and belong to the 
dead level. 

In the springtime love awakens, bom anew 
in the green wonder of the season's childhood. 
Yonder where the road climbs the hill the 
sunlight is sifting in long bars" through the 
eucalyptus trees, making a brown and golden 
ladder all along the way. In everything is the 
fresh, tender suggestion of a Sunday after- 
noon in springtime. The air is full of the 
scent of swamp-willow and laurel, and the 
breath of feeding cattle on the hills. 

By the roadside He and She walk shyly 
apart. They could scarcely clasp hands across 
the space which separates them, yet one see- 
ing them knows that their hearts are close 
together. The blue sky arches over them ; the 
soft clouds pass lightly above their heads ; the 
sunbeams bring brighter rounds for the brown 
and golden ladder his feet and hers tread 
lightly. They are palpably "of the people." 
Her hands are roughened and red from toil. 
His shoulders are bent by the early bearing of 
heavy burdens. Neither He nor She is over 
twenty years old, and they are poor, as some 
count riches, but to them, together, has come 

64 



the sweetness of life, and He and She are walk- 
ing on the heights. 

Yesterday they were hut a boy and a girl, 
but today He to her is Manhood; She, to him, 
is Womanhood, and in this great human wil- 
derness they have reached out and found each 
other. Could anything be more wonderful than 
this? Could anything exceed in beauty this 
secret of theirs which he who runs may read 
in every line of their illumined faces? Stu- 
dents versed in the'ologies: sociologists, phi- 
lanthropists, economists and progressionists of 
every sort, we know all that you would say. 
We have heard your arguments time and 
again. We have listened to your statistics 
and watched the shaking of your head over 
these unions of the poor. But the wisdom of 
life is wiser than men, else He and She would 
do well to listen to you instead of walking 
together here on the hill road. They do not 
know these things which we are seeking to 
reduce to what we call social science; and 
if they should know them, what then? Are 
they not of more value than many sparrows ? 

The afternoon shadows lengthen. Home- 
going groups are beginning the long descent. 
The voices of little children calling to one 
another ring silverly over the hillside. He and 

65 



She are not hastening. They have loitered 
along to 'where a bend in the road affords a 
wide outlook upon the city below, the gleam- 
ing bay, the white-w^inged ships coming in 
through the Golden Gate, the distant hills. In 
her hand are some poppies which he gathered. 
Down to the w^estern horizon sinks the sun. 
The gold has faded from the road, leaving it a 
winding ribbon of gray. The crests of the hills 
and the gently swelling uplands are flooded 
w^ith crimson Hght. It touches the eucalyptus 
trees into glory and flames in splendor along 
the western sky. It lights her face and his as 
they stand transformed before each other. 
They do not know that the crimson light has 
made them beautiful. They think the beauty 
each sees is the other's, a part of their won- 
derful discovery, and who shall say that either 
is w^rong? It is w^e who are blind, and not 
love. Indeed, love, alone, sees clearly. Exter- 
nal, temporal conditions have made his body 
less than noble; have crossed his face with 
dull, heavy lines. They have narrowed her 
mental horizon and imprisoned her soul in a 
poor little cage, but He and She are held 
above these, now. They have been touched 
by the finger of God, and have seen each 
other's beauty, the beauty which is their 

66 



jsiiM: V ■si.iwrmmr 



AN IDYL OF THE HILLS 



human right ; which once seen is never, again, 
'Wholly lost. 

The crimson has faded to rose, the rose to 
wonderful green, the green has turned to 
white. The early moon has come out to 
light the hill. Hand in hand they are passing 
down the road. Hand in hand they are going 
through life, toiling together, bearing together 
the burdens Fate brings to them. They know 
not what these may be. It is not given 
them to know the future, or by taking 
thought to lighten its ills or explain the 
blunders that have heaped these up. They 
have no strength or power, but to them has 
been given love. 

Will love be theirs when Spring is gone 
and the summer drouth is upon them; when 
Autumn's harvest time has passed them 
by and Winter's breath has chilled their 
blood? Will love be theirs when, hand in 
hand, in the uncertain white light, they jour- 
ney down the hill of life? The cynic smiles 
at the question. The scientist deprecates it. 
Philanthropist and sociologist shake their 
heads. Let it pass. Love is theirs now. 
The universe is theirs, for each to each is 
universal. The Life of the universe is in 
them, and in the shimmering radiance which 

67 



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lights the way, silvering the city and making 
long, shining paths across the distant water, 
they are walking down the hill road. 



68 



AT THE SMITHY DOOR 



AT THE SMITHY DOOR 



E3fe 



HE sunlight pours in through 
the wide door of the smithy 
and lights up the hlack walls 
and rafters, the shining anvil, 
the invalid vehicles, the broken 
wheels and half- wheels, axles, 
ploughshares, and old iron scat- 
tered about, and the forge, with its smolder- 
ing fire, its tall chimney and wheezy bellows. 
The delight of nature and the joy of hand- 
craft have met in this place. 

One may step from the back door directly 
down to the stream, which is here wide and 
shallow, with gravelly banks, overhung by 
great sycamores and oaks. From time to time 
the small wild life of the woods overflows into 
the shop. A brown towhee just hopped across 
the threshold and pecked, tentatively, among 
the scattered hoof-parings on the floor. A but- 
terfly, ^with widespread wings of black-and- 
white-and-orange, rests on the long sweep of 
the bellows. A huge, patient farm-horse, with 
crested neck and heavily feathered fetlock 
joints, looks around in mild interest, as the 
smith, with his long tongs, draws a big iron 
shoe from the fire and starts the anvil cho- 
rus ringing accompaniment to a shower of 
sparks. 



71 



The little brown bird takes flight at the 
sound of the first blow, although she had 
apparently been unconscious of the horse's 
restless movements, or the heavy stamping of 
his feet. The horse himself might be par- 
doned a small degree of nervousness, over the 
clangor and the blaze, but he shows no fear. 
What faithful, friendly toilers for man these 
big, narrow-brained creatures are, with their 
mild eyes and enormous strength ! They seem 
to have no knowledge of that strength, save 
as it serves man ; no will save to do his bid- 
ding. 

The craftsman here at the smithy is a 
French Canadian, who learned his trade as a 
youth in a little village of his country, where 
the blacksmith was the town oracle on all 
matters temporal, and the village priest kept 
watch and guard over the things of the spirit. 
He is superstitious at the same time that he 
is shrewd, but simple and straightforward, 
taking pride in his work, loving the animals 
he shoes and dealing fairly with all men. 

"You better had let me correct that bolt," 
he says, scanning the light cart of a stranger 
who has driven up to ask the way to the 
next village. "He may lose when you are 
away far off. I correct him in just one 

7a 



instant." He suits the action to the word 
and then smiles at the idea of taking pay 
for a thing like that. "There was nothing 
broke. I just correct him. He might break; 
might never hurt; you better be all right." 
Such is his idea of loving the neighbor. 

The smith would be filled with amaze 
could he know how admirable he is as he 
deftly fashions the shoe upon his anvil. 
There is something in manual skill which 
delights the sincerest depths in each of us. 
Who does not feel a certain warm pleasure 
in watching things making? I used daily to 
pass a window where a potter sat working 
at his wheel, making little bean-pots. His 
seemed as trivial a task as one could imag- 
ine, yet he was never without an audience. 
Workingmen paused to consider their fellow 
at his craft. Women lingered to watch the 
unfamiliar sight Street urchins htmg, fas- 
cinated, about the window, but the greater 
part of the loiterers were business men, 
wholesale merchants of the quarter, grave 
bankers, brokers, lawyers, men whose brains 
were constantly busy with large affairs. 
These could seldom pass the place without 
stopping to gaze at the whirling wheel and 
the slender, skilful fingers manipulating the 

73 



clay with a deftness that was a joy to 
behold. 

The pleasure which comes from handi- 
craft is fundamental. Note how quiet even 
a young child becomes if he can but watch 
something doing. The human hand is fash- 
ioned for constructing, as well as for grasp- 
ing, but we are likely to forget this, and to 
suffer through the forgetting, in the hurry 
and scramble of our modern, machine-made 
world. We need a return to first principles; 
to the thoughtfiilness, the delicacy, the sim- 
plicity which come from doing work in which 
head and hand act together. It is not wholly 
a fad, though there is danger that it may 
become one, the modem turning of so many 
people to hand-work, and to the work of 
olden time, for beauty of line and of struc- 
ture. Consciously or unconsciously, we come 
back to hand-craft as we come back to the 
soil, for the renewal of purpose and of 
strength. 

It is not, however, because it is old, or 
primarily, because it is hand-wrought, that a 
thing made by man has beauty. We can 
create ugliness with our hands; we are doing 
it in these days, constructing things useless 
and false, for the mere sake of construction, 

74 



missing wholly the principles of use and 
honesty. In early days, when a man wrought, 
in whatever fabric, he made things as a man 
might, with straightforwardness, until they 
served his purpose. He ornamented his struc- 
ture, too, as he could, but gave no thought to 
the construction of ornament. Thus the old 
things, things crude and common if you will, 
have a beauty all their own, because they 
are frankly what human craft could attain 
to. Their sturdy simplicity of line appeals 
to what is best in us. We call their designs 
quaint, and prate of artistic values, and of 
aesthetics, but it is really their honesty which 
touches us, and that which is honest in us 
stirs to response. Machine-made stufT is so 
often cheap and meretricious, not because of 
its mechanical lifelessness, but because it at- 
tempts too much. The certainty of mechan- 
ical effort has tempted us to artistic sin. The 
result is such ugliness and hatefulness as are 
the inevitable accompaniments of all sin. 

I own a rough gray mug of commonest 
clay — the simplest thing in the way of a 
vessel that the human hand can make, 
whirled out from a wheel and finished with 
a handle of clay, thick and clumsy, pinched 
up from the lump and pressed on; but in 

75 




shaping this handle the craftsman drew his 
thumb and fingers down its length and fash- 
ioned it into a curve that fits to the hand 
like a familiar glove. It lies in the bent 
fingers with the comfort of a caress, and 
the thumb falls into place on its top, just 
where the potter's thumb pressed and per- 
fected his work. The marks of thumb and 
fingers are plainly visible in the clay, and I 
never take the cup from its hook without a 
feeling of pleasure. The sense of kinship in 
that human touch makes the rough fabric 
lovely. Looking at it the user realizes that 
so his own hand would have lingered and 
pressed, had the cup been his work. What 
some one has called "the imperfection of 
human effort" becomes the perfection of 
human sympathy. 

The sounds fi*om the woods mingle pleas- 
antly with the clangor of hammer upon anvil, 
and the shuffling, restless movements of the 
farm-horse. Going out through the little rear 
door the conditions are reversed; the sounds 
from the smithy ring silverly above the run- 
ning of the water, the breathing of the soft 
wind in the trees, and the peevish, incessant 
call for food, of young birds. The stream is 
as transparent as glass, and small fresh- water 

76 



crabs go skittering along on the gravelly 
bottom. 

The canyon is full of peace and beauty, and 
still with the alert stillness of an afternoon in 
the full springtide. The perfume of fruit- 
blossoms fills the air, and the whole world 
thrills with ineffable meaning, like an angelic 
word. The big farm-horse has been shod 
and is now tied outside the smithy. His 
owner w^ill presently come and lead him 
home. The golden afternoon is wearing to a 
close. The sun is hidden behind the hills as 
the smith secures his rough, battened door by 
thrusting a padlock through a staple on the 
outside, shaking it to see that it is secure ere 
he takes his way homeward through the 
canyon. I hear him humming a bit of song 
as he goes. Why should he not sing ? What 
said the gentle sage of Vailima of the essen- 
tials to happiness ? " To earn a little ; to spend 
a little less; to be kind; to be honest; to 
have a few friends." Then, as one walks 
home through the early springtime evening 
nature's own chorus takes up the song and 
rounds it to completion. 



tofC. 

77 



THIS EDITION OT UPLAND PASTURES WAS DONE 
FOR MESSRS. PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY AT THE 
TOMOYE PRESS, SAN FRANCISCO, IN THE YEAR 
NINETEEN HUNDRED & FOUR. NO OTHER EDITION 
WILL BE PRINTED FROM THE TYPE USED HEREIN. 



X 



y 



SEP 26 1904 



